This link was circulated by Simon McCrudden, one of our planners. It’s an article from the New York Times about a Chevrolet campaign in the US that invites consumers to make their own ads by adding their own words and cutting together footage and music clips posted on the Chevy website, http://chevyapprentice.com/

(Yes, there seems to have been some sort of product placement association with the US version of The Apprentice. Clearly, Chevrolet feels that its potential customers have an affinity for the Gordon Gecko-style philosophy of personal advancement celebrated by that show’s revelling in backstabbing, gold taps and personal jets.)

The site invites you to choose from various bits and pieces of video that highlight product features of some new Chevy SUV monster and enter your customised ad for a competition. Clearly, in order to do this, you need to spend a fair bit of time learning about the car. And obviously Chevy was hoping that people would also e-mail their own videos around the Web and post them on things like You Tube. Which people certainly have done. But the videos that were circulated most widely were ones that slagged off the Chevy for its shitty gas mileage and accused the company of damaging the environment.

For example, one ad used a clip of the car driving through a desert. "Our planet’s oil is almost gone," it said. "You don’t need G.P.S. to see where this road leads."

Chevrolet is getting some criticism over this. Anti-4×4 campaigners are mocking them online. But it’s not as if Chevy wouldn’t have foreseen this response. It’s not new news that 4x4s are bad for the environment. Obviously Chevy felt that the positives would outweigh the negatives. Can a positive consumer-created ad ever be as widely circulated as one that takes the piss? People just love to see corporations being made to look foolish, particularly if they can turn the campany’s own marketing against them.

Having said that, there are one or two examples of widely-circulated consumer-created ads made by people who are genuine fans of the brand.

This one is an iPOd commercial created by US teacher and Apple fan George Masters.

It not only bigs up the iPod mini, it rehabilitates 80s indie popsters the Darling Buds. A remarkable achievement. Interestingly, the execution also works as an ad for what you can create on your Apple laptop.

Here’s another one, created by blogger and pundit Joseph Jaffe for one of our clients, Nike, utilising footage of an amazing cliffhanging Tiger Woods putt from the Masters.

In this case, the execution itself was very simple but the speed with which the opportunity had been spotted, the ad created and posted online (that same night) was the thing that gave it newsworthiness and momentum. An ‘official’ Nike agency like ourselves couldn’t possibly have done it this quickly because of the need to clear rights and permissions.

So, is this stuff the future? Are efforts like those of Chevy to incentivise people to create their own content doomed to fail? (Let’s hope not. Our client Nike has, with Google, created a football community website, joga.com, that aims to elicit content contributions from fans.) Is it only ‘cool’ brands like Nike and Apple who have enough fans to create and share positive examples of their own content? It’ll be interesting to see.